Posts by Doctor Syntax

Zoom vows to spend next 90 days thinking hard about its security and privacy after rough week, meeting ID war-dialing tool emerges

"So much so, Zoom published advice on how to keep uninvited morons out of private conferences."

That's half the problem solved then.

BOFH: Will the last one out switch off the printer?

"my wife refuses to play with me cos she says I cheat, she only says that cos I win all the time"

I've always hated the game as being boring and lasting far too long. Instead my wife has given up playing with our grandson as he always wins.

Cricket's average-busting mathematician Tony Lewis pulls up stumps

I just checked to see if he was also the Tony Lewis who played for England and later became a cricket journalist. He wasn't. However the Wonkypedia entry for the player shows him as having died on April 1st as well. Outstanding coincidence or wonky editor? I'll settle for the latter whilst wondering of the statistician could have estimated the probability of the former.

US prez Trump's administration reportedly nears new rules banning 'dual-use' tech sales to China

What happens if those dual use products also have a use in medical equipment, say ventilators, which get exported to the US? One of the effects of globalisation is that it's not a big world any more. Or, to put it another way, it's difficult to shoot somebody else without your own foot getting in the way.

Here's what Europeans are buying amid the COVID-19 lockdown – aside from heaps of pasta and toilet paper

Re: Lost post

On neither ground is it an appropriate address field in the UK.

Re: Lost post

We're not quite the same - House name, Road name, Post town about 2 miles away. At least post code works for us. The other day I tried ordering something over the phone from the local pharmacist - their merchant S/W required a house number to verify a card payment over the phone.

And what's this "City" field so many forms have? I haven't lived anywhere that ranked as a city for the last third of a century.

Re: Lost post

OTOH they're the most reliable here. I've had all manner of problems with other carriers who seem to either lose stuff in their systems, deliver to the wrong house or simply not see a house name carved in 6" high letters on a block of stone. Under normal circumstances I prefer to get Amazon stuff delivered to a locker. Vendors' systems that can't cope with a house not having a number are another problem.

The posties, however, know us, would be able to deal with a misaddressed parcel and also know enough to link us and our daughter who lives a mile away and have been known to leave her parcels with us when they didn't have anywhere handy to leave it there. It's the sort of thing that happens out in the country!

Huawei P40 pricing is in step with previous P-series efforts – but flagship lacks the apps punters have come to expect

No social media? I call that value for money.

Marriott Hotels hacked AGAIN: Two compromised employee logins abused to siphon off 5.2m guests' personal info

Re: Expectation

True, but if they had a reasonable expected amount shouldn't an alarm have been triggered at much, much less than 5.2 million records?

And the years=old advice is don't click on any link in an unsolicited email. The fact that marketroids stuff their spam with links makes me think that they've never had that explained to them in words of one syllable and a 2 x 4. That in turn makes me realise that marketing departments are the easiest way in for anyone launching a malware attack. Between that and data hoarding they're a danger to any business.

(a) To stop somebody else doing it to spoof the.

(b) Because it's outsourced.

I CBA to check if this applies to them but all too often this stuff is outsourced. When that happens a quick whois makes their marketing spam look like phishing. Yes, banks and building societies, I'm looking at you.

Nice timing.

According to the Register report on the previous breach they and the ICO have agreed to "an extension of the regulatory process", whatever that might mean until today. Somehow I doubt the ICO will be inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt over this. They have informed the ICO haven't they? There's no mention of it.

In the meantime Experian get to slurp a it more of their customers' data.

Zoom's end-to-end encryption isn't actually end-to-end at all. Good thing the PM isn't using it for Cabinet calls. Oh, for f...

"Setup and use is idiot-proof."

Idiot proof or idiot friendly?

Because the government overruled them? It's not unknown for top management anywhere to decide that rules only apply to little people and do their own insecure thing.

Re: What else is there?

Take a look at what can be built on NextCloud, assuming you have the capacity to host it yourself.

Re: Boris: You sacked Bob Quick for less!

There was quite a back story to that as the Grauniad article explains. It struck me at the time that if he hadn't upset the then opposition he might have survived. If you put yourself out on a limb expect it to be cut off.

Re: To be clear ...

It should be part of the S/W. If they advertise end-to-end encryption and mean it the way the rest of us expect it to be meant then they'd need to do that. The user need never be aware of it.

Re: Surprising. Or not.

I'm not sure the cabinet counts as one of the most advanced nations on the planet.

Re: Security Services

That would involve taking advice from experts. Give them time. They're only just realising they need to do that.

Re: To be clear ...

If the meeting has a specific host then the host could manage the key centrally.

How many days of carefree wiping do you have left before life starts to look genuinely apocalyptic? Let's find out

"only have four of any one alcohol product"

That explains it. Daughter is doing the shopping for us and some of her neighbours. She left the entire till-roll with our shopping this morning & it started off with 4 bottles of Chardonay.

"as the weather warms"

Not much sign of that here.

Welcome to the telco, we've got fun and games: BT inks 5-year deal to outsource mainframe management to IBM

"The five-year contract with IBM nestles well with BT's intention to close the public switched telephone network by 2025."

I wonder. Applying the basic law of project timelines "close the PSTN by 2025" translates to "close the PSTN starting in 2025 at the earliest". When that happens we can reasonably expect customer support calls to go up just as the contract for supporting this system supporting customer service ends. From IBM's PoV the renewal nestles well with that, maybe from the BT side not so much.

Talk about ill-gotten gains: Coronavirus KOs Xerox's $30bn months-long hostile takeover bid of HP Inc

Re: aren't they doomed anyway ?

"This was all Carl Icahn's baby from the get-go"

Is it too much to hope that he'll lose money from it?

Re: aren't they doomed anyway ?

It sounds just like the sort of thing for SoftBank to sink its money into.

Pandemic impact: Two-thirds of polled Reg readers say it's business as usual in the IT dept, one in ten panicking

Re: Good for InfoSec's business!

"they won't listen to the dumb husband of their employee!"

If/when they get hacked they'll blame you. Shooting the messenger - SOP.

Does that include the instances where business as usual is panic?

Stob's vital message to Britain's IT nation: And no, it's not about that

You could add the plural of eye: eyen and, of course, for I: iron.

Half of organisations willing to be led into the first circle of hell, or what Dante might call upgrading an ERP system

Re: "79 per cent said by migrating infrastructure to the cloud"

It's very much the outcome you'd expect when a cloud vendor surveys somebody whose job may well depend on persuading the board to spend more money on that job.

'Social distancing champ' Linus Torvalds releases Linux 5.6, tells devs to put health before next release

"Of course the upside of doing this is that any code will be open to scrutiny in the same way the rest of Linux is."

The code in the closed source userland won't be.

Re: Whatever for?

Calling them smart speakers is classic getting rid of the difficult bit in the title. They are, of course, smart listeners (for some value of smart).

Re: "the pandemic has wiped out pension funds and investments"

Technically a good many pension funds were already wiped out* in that their assets didn't meet their predicted future liabilities.

Their managers may still be hoping the pandemic wipes out some of their liabilities**. However, as a member of one of those schemes I'm doing my best to frustrate that.

* Thanks largely to governments that enforced "payment holidays" based on over-optimistic projections and then became addicted to low interest rates than ensured the projections were even more over-optimistic than ever. It's in the nature of pensions that making up those missed payments is a good deal more onerous than making them at the time would have been.

** Realistically what they're probably most hoping for is a big increase in interest rates so that the payouts from their assets are restored to expected levels.

BT providing free meals to coax its healthy customer support staff back into office as calls rocket amid pandemic

Re: Not a tech problem

"Of course everyone had plausible excuses why things were taking so long."

Excuses or reasons? Reasons such as infrastructure problems? Did you ever look at the issues they raised and try to address them?

Re: asymptotic

I suppose auto-correct can be a bitch.

It might not be something that can be set up quickly - although a lot of other businesses seem to have managed it. However BT sells at least some of the technology to enable it so you might expect them to have moved a portion of the operation over to that if only to sample it for quality control let alone for business continuity preparedness. At least you would have expected them to if you hadn't had previous experience of BT management style.

Escalate? There's escalation? The only escalation I've come across was me walking to the village to find a couple of guys the operator didn't know about in manholes* redoing all the connections to the cabinets. The alternative escalation offered was an engineer visit for which I'd have been charge if no fault had been found - which there wouldn't have been as the maintenance would have been finished by then.

But only "not particularly surprised"? I doubt BT management has changed much in the last qusrter century or so** so not in the least surprised.

* Personholes if you prefer.

** Is it really that long? Nearly. Wow!

BT reopens £90m UK High Court case over 1970s VAT 'overpayments'

Re: Meanwhile in IR35 land...

"The issue is, you're effectively an employee, that's why the law catches you."

If they were effectively employees then their effective employers wouldn't be ditching them now, they'd be getting 80% of their effective salaries from HMG. Or if they showed symptoms and had to self isolate their effective employer would be paying them sick pay and, again, getting support from HMG.

Oddly enough neither their effective employers nor HMG are doing any of these things so how do you make out that they're effective employees?

"a big dollop of tax (free) cash would be very welcome at the one-time state monopoly"

It wouldn't do the pension fund any harm either.

Official: Office 365 Personal, Home axed next month... and replaced by Microsoft 365 cloud subscriptions

Re: Office 2007 has been serving me well for over 10 years

"Astonishing how well a package that is 10 years old covers my home office needs."

If your needs haven't changed then it's not astonishing.

Watch your MANRS: Akamai, Amazon, Netflix, Microsoft, Google, and pals join internet routing security effort

Oops. Proof against

To what extent would this be proof of government bad actors? Logging requirements, national security letters and the like must make all of the participants liable to interference.

That awful moment when what you thought was a number 1 turned out to be a number 2

Slicing responsibility like that is a great way to spread the blame when things go wrong. It might be spread so thinly that everyone escapes blame. However it's a very effective means of ensuring that things go wrong. On the whole it's better to concentrate on avoiding blame by not having things go wrong in the first place.

Re: Passwords

"Unfortunately, that's not practical for any system that's more critical, as it requires storing the password in either plaintext or decryptable fashion."

Not quite true. The alternative is to generate all the off-by-one character passwords and store the hashes of those but it's an expensive way of enlarging your attack surface. I suspect a similar approach is taken for systems which ask you to type in letters 2,5 and 8 of your password.

Re: People still use cheques in the 21st century?

"No issues with their product, but now they spam me every few days with their discount offers wanting me to order more. The amount I purchased should last me until about 2030 at the rate I use them."

Somehow I can't get rid of the idea that marketing and HR squabble over the same set of potential recruits.

Remember that clinical trial, promoted by President Trump, of a possible COVID-19 cure? So, so, so many questions...

Re: Whilst We’re On the Topic...

" What matters to society is the quality of research being done, and the efficiency with which it is carried out.....it leads to more scientist duplicating effort in topics scientists like to study"

One of the things that drives quality of research is time spent trying to duplicate - actually replicate - others' results. If you don't do that you find that some dodgy stuff gets published. Read Feynman's comments, especially on psychological research.

Re: Echo chamber aside

Thanks for that.

Scrolling down the comments I find "An obvious confounding factor is the fact malaria is mostly in poor countries, and they probably have little testing and reporting of these cases." apparently from the blog owner. And this is the trouble with statistics. The factor which gives rise to the source of the correlation isn't necessarily the one that you're looking as but one which influences what you're taking as the independent variable.

I was brought up short on this a few days ago. Because my area (part of the old West Riding) is known to have escaped fairly lightly in the '18/'19 epidemic, probably because of a widely scattered rural population I looked at the recent confirmed cases as a percentage of population, as given on the Beeb's site, for different local govt. areas. The rates were very close between us and a similar area to the north. A ordering area which I think has a proportionally greater urban element (none of these areas are purely rural) had about twice as many cases as we have. Looking good. Then I tried another adjacent area which I thought comparable with the last and it fell in between. So did a more urban area. Then I tried another urban area and it had a significantly lower number of cases per head than mine. So am I looking at genuine incidences of disease or at health authorities with different testing policies (the almost identical area to ours is under the same health authority)?

Astroboffin gets magnets stuck up his schnozz trying and failing to invent anti-face-touching coronavirus gizmo

Re: What a hoot(er)!

My take on it was that he has a nose for interesting, new problems.

Delivery drones: Where are they when we really need them?

Finally - a good use case. And as it can only carry one you don't even have to fork out for a round.

The despatch points for most carriers seem to be at least 20 miles from where I live, the exception being Royal Mail at 2 miles.

The despatch depot can fill an entire van with parcels and set it trundling round the route - one round trip delivers many parcels. If the current drone problem is getting the payload up to one decent-sized parcel it sounds as if they haven't got near their real problem - a drone with the carrying capacity of a van to replace the multiple 40 mile return journeys per parcel.

Then, when we've got drones that size we have a whole new problem...

Re: "Futurist predict"

"I live in an area with buried utilities."

All the utilities may be buried but I'd guess any street lights are still overhead.